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San Francisco Bay
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11610 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1986 |
8,124 Words |
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Arthur Quinn
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Czeslaw Milosz's Visions from San Francisco Bay, a collection of essays first published in Polish in 1969 almost a decade after he arrived at Berkeley, has been the most neglected of his works translated since he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. At first glance the neglect is surprising, for this book could be for American readers the best introduction to Milosz's work. Here in a series of short, clear essays Milosz presents his view of the human condition, and presents it, too, in terms of his analysis of contemporary American culture. But it is precisely this view of the human condition that explains the neglect. Milosz's vision of our predicament is enough to make a comfortable reader wince.
To be sure, Visions from San Franciso Bay was widely reviewed. And all the reviews we read were positive, respectful, sometimes enthusiastic, always full of good cheer. It was the good cheer that depressed us. The reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle liked the book because in it one could learn the Great Man's response to highways, underground newspapers, sidewalk preachers, supermarkets. Reading that review was like watching Milosz himself being trimmed and put under cellophane for supermarket display, somewhere between the capers and fresh salmon.
The best of the reviews - and a careful, intelligent review it was - bore the title "The Devil and Mr. Milosz." Here was that good cheer again, the demonic voices evoked by Milosz re-channeled to sound amusing, as if from George Bernard Shaw or The Screwtape Letters. Milosz was being neglected with attention.
Visions from San Franciso Bay itself offers a description and explanation of this strange process, with respect not to Milosz himself, but rather to the great California poet Robinson Jeffers. Milosz believes that Jeffers failed to be taken seriously by his contemporaries because he tried to breakthrough "the invisible web of censorship." "One must recall that he was neglected by people who placed great value on meat, alcohol, comfortable house, luxurious cars, and tolerated works as if they were harmless hobbies" (V, 93).
Make Milosz's work a mere exercise in autobiographical expression; make it an intriguing commentary on the vagaries of twentieth-century history; make it a convenient opportunity to express ringing support for Solidarity, or to praise the remarkable range in modern poetry. But when Milosz says that the demonic is at the core of contemporary life, when he asserts that the highest function of discourse is exorcism or that poets should pray that "good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments" (BW, 31)-well, then he must be speaking figuratively. It would be undecorous to take him at his word. Such a way of talking must be for so sophisticated, so sensitive, so accomplished a man, only a harmless hobby.
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In 1960, after a semester as a visitor, Czeslaw Milosz was offered, and accepted, a permanent position at the University of California at Berkeley. He would now no longer have to earn his living with his pen. And he would be far removed from the Byzantine polities of Paris. One of the first essays he wrote in Berkeley was, at least in part, an expression of relief.
While in Paris he had become interested in Gilbert
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